Opening Up a Can of Worms

[Keith Broaders]

In the opinion of 19th century Constitutional Scholar Lysander Spooner the Constitution for the United States never had the authority we have been led to believe.  This document written by a small group of rich white well educated white men who wanted to preserve and protect their positions as the American aristocracy. Women, slaves and indigenous people were denied rights enjoyed by their white counterparts.

Of the over 700,000 people who were living in Virginia at the time George Washington was elected President, less than 40,000 people even got to participate in his election. We have been told that our government received its authority from the consent of the governed. When the Constitution was ratified in 1788, only a small percentage of the people had the opportunity to give their consent. All of those who gave their consent have been dead for over one hundred years and we have been given the opportunity to give our consent/

How does a person give his or her consent? Is it based on the fact that we live in the United States? Do we give our consent by voting or paying taxes? If the Constitution is a contact, don't both parties need to agree on the terms?

If the Constitution that was written to restrain the government the government refuses to follow the Constitution, do have a right to withdraw our consent? Do we have the authority to alter or abolish our government? If you read the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence the answer is clearly stated."When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed,

Whenever any form of government become abusive  it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

 Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,

It is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. — The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny

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